Time to dust off your finest time-traveling threads, charge up your time travel whatchamacallit and get ready to be sometime else! Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day is a celebration of all things anachronistic and futuristic.
The origin of the holiday:
Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day was created by Aaron Diaz in 2007 as a way to celebrate the joys of science fiction and fantasy. Some say he stumbled upon a time machine in an abandoned laboratory, while others claim he received a mysterious package in the mail that contained a set of futuristic clothes and a note instructing him to spread the joy of time travel.
Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day takes place on September 12, after being moved from its original date of December 8. If you happen to see people dressed up in period costumes on December 8, don’t be alarmed, they are just time travelers from before 2009 or they who got their dates mixed up.
Why celebrate?
Time travel has been a popular concept in science fiction for decades, and this holiday allows us to live out our wildest time-traveling fantasies. It gives us the chance to ponder the great questions of time and space, like “If you go back in time and change something, are you actually changing the present or just creating an alternate timeline?” and “Can you really call it ‘time travel’ if you’re just standing still and letting the world spin around you?” Of course, there are some ethical questions that could be raised, such as what if your time-traveling antics accidentally change the course of history? Can you really live with the guilt of knowing that you prevented the discovery of fire or caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?
How to celebrate:
First and foremost, you’ll need a costume. This can be anything from a classic Victorian suit to a sleek space suit. Then, you’ll need to choose a time period to visit and do some research on the customs and language of the day.
You could try hopping in a phone booth and zipping around to different eras.
Walk around in public and talk loudly into a “time communicator” about how the future is looking pretty bleak or how awesome it is.
You could visit historical landmarks.
Attend a Renaissance fair
Simply hang out with friends and pretend you’re all from different eras.
Incorporate time-traveling elements into their daily routine, like pretend your car is a time machine or speak in an old-fashioned dialect.
Hold a “time-traveling potluck” where everyone brings a dish from a different era.
Curl up with a good time-travel novel and pretend you’re right there in the thick of things.
As for safety tips, well, you’ll definitely want to watch out for paradoxes and the butterfly effect. Be careful not to cross-contaminate viruses, bacteria, fungi, or otherwise disturb biological balances by introducing exotic species. Also be careful with information that people from another era cannot handle. Spoilers, sweety! And of course, there’s always the risk of accidentally getting stuck in a different time period altogether, which could be…problematic.
With this in mind…
Whatever you do, just remember that the first rule of Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day is that you can’t actually tell anyone that you’re a time traveler. See you yesterday!
